Autochartist is an advanced charting tool for conducting in depth market analysis in order to help traders with making informed trading decisions. Autochartist gives traders access to possible trade opportunities which can be filtered according to those that have the highest probability of hitting the target forecast. Every potential trading signal is evaluated against past performance with respect to the pattern type, the instrument and the time of day it was identified. It can be used for trading forex, stocks, commodities, cryptocurrencies, precious metal and any other market.
Autochartist automatically scans any instrument and timeframe to help make sure that you do not miss any trading opportunities. It was originally launched way back in 2002 with the sole purpose of serving traders on the Johannesburg exchange. Since then, it has grown significantly in popularity. It ventured into the US market in 2004, primarily serving the demand of the commodity and Forex markets. The Autochartist software was then offered to traders directly through brokers in 2006. It has continued to grow in popularity, making it one of the most important fully automated market scanning and analytical tools available to the retail trader.
Read on to find out more about how this leading trading tool can help traders of all different experience levels with various different goals and trading strategies. You will learn more about Autochartist, including its features and benefits, as well as how to use it in your trading.
What is Autochartist?
Autochartist is an innovative, powerful and advanced chart analysis tool, that can help traders conduct detailed market analysis to help them identify actionable trading signals. It is capable of performing complex chart analysis across multiple charts and timeframes, that can usually take years of study and practice, in seconds.
The Autochartist unique pattern recognition software continuously scans various markets in real-time and sends alerts to the user to notify them about possible trade opportunities. It can identify thousands of trade ideas each month, which can save users valuable time by analysing their favourite instruments on auto-pilot.
It is possible to set Autochartist to send you alerts when the advanced scanner function identifies emerging or completed patterns on your preferred trading instruments and with your chosen pattern types, providing real-time trading signals. It can be used for buy and sell signals, whilst it can also be used to look for an exit from an existing trade.
When conducting market analysis, Autochartist uses a combination of price action analysis, technical analysis, fundamental analysis, along with key support and resistance levels, to suggest emerging trends. It uses almost every technical indicator that you can think of, form simple moving averages to more complex technical indicators such as Fibonacci retracements.
Impressively, the Autochartist platform is estimated to have sent over 400,000 potential trade opportunities each month. This makes it an all-in-one solution and one of the most popular trading tools available. I think it is safe to say that it is the leading chart pattern recognition software for brokers and traders alike.
It doesn’t matter if you are a short-term trader, day trader or want to hold positions for the long term. Autochartist can be used for any chart timeframe and trading strategy. You can use it to scan any trading instrument that your broker offers.
Autochartist Features
Now that we have covered what Autochartist is and what it does, lets take a look at some of its key features. There are numerous features that are beneficial to users, some of which include the following:
- Identify chart patterns
- Send real-time signals
- Scan the market continuously 24/7
- Combination of market analysis
- Price action analysis
- Technical analysis
- Fundamental analysis
- Support and resistance
- Customised market scans
- A built-in price movement scanner
- Daily market news
- Compatible with the MetaTrader 4 & MetaTrader 5 platforms
- Covers most financial markets such as Forex, Indices, Commodities, Stocks, CFD’s and Futures
- Any trading instruments
- Any timeframe
- Free with supporting brokers
What are the advantages of Autochartist?
Autochartist has features that are designed to identify chart patterns in any chart and timeframe. There are many distinct advantages to using the Autochartist software, let us take a brief look at some of the main advantages that it can present to traders.
Automated Market Analysis
Autochartist has the ability to automatically scan multiple markets for you on a continuous basis. It can find signals that could take hours of learning and chart analysis to spot manually.
Signal Alerts
One of the core benefits of Autochartist is the real-time insights into market movements that it generates for traders. It can send you a signal alert when it finds a qualifying trading signal.
This means that you do not need to be sat at your desk and gazing at charts all day. You could simply fire up the MetaTrader app on your mobile device and take a trade from there when you do receive an Autochartist alert.
Autochartist can even alert you to trades that you might not have considered before. As an example, it may identify that a currency pair (e.g. USD/JPY) has become highly volatile following an announcement by the US Federal Reserve (Fed) or the Bank of Japan (BoJ).
To receive the automatic alerts from Autochartist you will need to enter your email address. You can then select the type of reports that you would like to receive. You can also set it to send you platform pop-up/sound alerts if you are going to be close to your machine. You just need to login to your Autochartist account or you can set alerts directly from the Autochartist plugin if it is automatically provided by your forex broker.
SMS & Push Notifications
Autochartist can deliver market analysis directly to traders through their SMS gateway or through your mobile application via Push Notifications. The SMS feature allows traders to see an image and open their mobile trading platform in order to place a trade.
By providing you with such alerts, Autochartist can make it less likely that you will miss out on an opportunity to capitalise on pending market movements. Just remember to always conduct your own analysis and confirm each signal before taking any trade. There are no guarantees on how well trading signals will perform and you should have a clear understanding of all the significant risks involved with trading online. Never risk more than you can afford to lose.
Multiple Chart Analysis
Its software is also designed to identify trading opportunities for you based on different types of market analysis, including technical analysis, price action analysis, candlestick patterns, support and resistance levels and more.
Support and Resistance Levels
Autochartist can find significant support and resistance levels, which are often referred to as the building blocks of technical analysis. There are many effective trading strategies that can be built around these levels. This is because support and resistance are often key price areas in which price can bounce back up or fall back down.
The reason why these levels appear and are so important is due to the balance between buyers and sellers, or what’s commonly called the demand and supply. When there is more demand than supply, the price can rise. On the other hand, when there is more supply than demand, the price can fall.
Traders may consider using these levels for entry and exit points into the market, which is one of the reasons there can be significant movement around them.
Customised Analysis
The Autochartist search pane enables users to define the parameters of the markets that the software will scan. You can filter the scanner parameters to receive pattern types and key levels specific to your trading strategy, including:
- Filter the types of patterns including common patterns, Fibonacci, support and resistance
- Display patterns across various long- and short-term intervals
- Indicate the number of historical patterns to be shown
The search can be customised to your individual trading style, or you could even get creative and use it to search markets that are less familiar to you to try and find opportunities that you may not have otherwise known about.
Price Momentum
Autochartist is capable of highlighting the range in which a price has moved over a specified period of time. This can be done on an hourly or daily basis and is a useful way in which traders can clearly see how susceptible a market has been to price changes.
Chart Pattern Recognition
The chart pattern-recognition capabilities of Autochartist are a significant benefit of the software. Autochartist can analyse charts for numerous candlestick patterns, including spinning tops, engulfing candlesticks, dojis and more.
Candlestick patterns can take years to master and are often thought of as one of the best forms of market analysis as they show what the current price action is, rather than using any lagging indicators. Autochartist can spot hundreds of patterns across multiple charts, all at the same time. This would be extremely difficult to do manually and very time consuming.
Whether you’re looking for channels, wedges, triangles, flags or other popular chart patterns, the inbuilt scanner tools help to identify statistically significant market movements for you, sending updates automatically.
When you open a pattern on to your chart, a details window will appear in the top right with further information, including the type of pattern displayed, the length and direction of the pattern and if it’s emerging or completed. This detail screen will also display a range of useful trend characteristics such as quality, uniformity and clarity.
Technical Analysis
Autochartist can analyse charts using a combination of technical indicators such as the Ichimoku Cloud, Bollinger bands, relative strength index, stochastics, MACD, Fibonacci retracements – along with a host of other technical indicators.
You don’t need to overload your charts with indicators and have multiple chart windows open, Autochartist can do it all for you. If there is a trading strategy idea you have, you can likely setup the software to scan the markets and alert you to trading signals based on it.
Fibonacci Patterns
The Fibonacci sequence is a set of numbers that starts with a one or a zero, followed by a one, and proceeds based on the rule that each number (called a Fibonacci number) is equal to the sum of the preceding two numbers. This sequence can then be broken down into ratios which some believe provide clues as to where a given financial market will move to.
Common Fibonacci numbers in financial markets are 0.236, 0.382, 0.618, 1.618, 2.618, 4.236. These ratios or percentages can be found by dividing certain numbers in the sequence by other numbers.
Learning how to identify Fibonacci retracements can be complicated and confusing. However, Fibonacci extensions, ABCD patterns and Butterfly and Gartley patterns can be a lot easier to spot with the Autochartist built-in Fibonacci scans.
Rapid Analysis
Autochartist can literally save users hundreds of hours that would need to be spent dedicated to scanning the markets manually for possible buy and sell signals. Undertaking complex technical analysis and chart pattern recognition can be a daunting and repetitive task for and trader.
Autochartist takes the hassle away by doing it for you, so that you can spend more time developing your own trading strategies or learning about new techniques that you think might be useful for you.
Versatile
Autochartist is a very versatile product due to the fact that it is capable of highlighting thousands of possible trades opportunities every month across a range of different financial markets, including forex, stocks, cryptos and indices. Whatever market or timeframe you want to trade, the flexible Autochartist charting tool is likely to support it.
This flexibility allows you to be alerted to the most relevant trading opportunities and then back test them against historical patterns. This can give us a rough idea of how they may have performed historically but is of course not an indication or guarantee of future results.
Accessibility
If you have the MetaTrader 4/5 platform and a compatible forex broker, you can use Autochartist. It doesn’t matter how many years of experience you have trading or if you are a complete beginner, the software can be used by anyone. This means that anyone can take advantage of the complex Autochartist analysis and trading signal software.
Volatility Analysis
You can get statistical analysis of market volatility over the last six months for specific instrument and timeframe intervals, to help you with guidance on potential trading opportunities for placing stop loss and take profit levels.
Extreme Change
Autochartist can send you alerts when there are excessive movements in one direction. This can help you to keep track of the biggest market movements.
Macro-Economic Analysis
Users can try to capitalize on known outcomes of macro-economic news events. I believe that fundamental analysis is often over looked, especially by new traders. Keeping on top of the latest economic news releases can be a very important part of knowing what market movements you may expect to happen.
You can filter the news according to the impact it is expected to have, the impact that it actually had, along with the prior, forecasted and actual results. You can even set news alerts when a specific important news event is approaching.
Risk Calculator
You can use the risk calculator tool to help you manage your cash exposure and minimize large capital losses.
Custom Watchlists
Let’s be honest, it would be more or less impossible to try and follow every single signal generated on every trading instruments and every chart timeframe. This is where the Autochartist watchlist feature can come in handy. From here, you can choose the symbols and signals that matter the most to you, so that you only receive relevant alerts to the market movements you are following.
Daily Market Analysis
Autochartist provide an analyst-written daily market update specifically targeted at inexperienced traders. It uses trading opportunities identified by Autochartist and explains how to interpret them.
For more experienced traders, they also provide a weekly article produced by an inhouse R&D department. These articles contain in-depth market analysis primarily around statistical methods.
What are the disadvantages of Autochartist?
As we have discussed in detail, Autochartist is great as an automated chart scanning software that can save users from hours of painstaking market analysis and even send alerts for opportunities based on various analysis methodologies.
That being said, Autochartist does have some limitations. Here we will take a brief look at some of the things that it is not capable of doing so you can get a clearer idea of what to expect.
Automated Trading
Whilst Autochartist is an industry leader when it comes to automated chart analysis, it does not place trades on your behalf. It can scan the market for signals and send you alerts, but it is your own responsibility to open and close positions.
I think this is a good thing and probably a regulatory requirement. If they did allow fully automated trading, I could see many users blaming the software for their own poor trading decisions. It is your own responsibility to decide how to use the Autochartist signals and what your money management strategy will be. The software just finds possible signals and presents ideas to help support decision making, without making the decision itself.
Signal Confirmation
As good as Autochartist is at scanning the markets, this does not mean that every signal will be a good one. For this reason, I would personally want to confirm each Autochartist signal with my own market analysis based on my own individual trading strategy and goals.
What may seem like a valid signal for one trader, may not be for another trader. For instance, if a user is following a scalping strategy, they may take a trade that a swing trader wouldn’t, and vice versa.
You should carry out your own technical analysis and fundamental analysis alongside Autochartist to confirm any opportunities that the software identifies.
How do I download Autochartist?
Autochartist is often used on the MetaTrader 4 (MT4) and MetaTrader 5 (MT5) platform. MetaTrader is widely regarded as one of the best trading platforms for forex traders, with millions of users all around the globe. You can get Autochartist for free when you open an account with certain forex brokers. If you haven’t already got the MetaTrader platform, you can download it free of charge and even open a risk-free demo account from the majority of forex brokers.
If you want to use Autochartist, then IC Markets offer it free of charge to their clients. I believe they are a broker with very competitive trading conditions including tight spreads, low fees and rapid execution speeds. I have an account with them myself and like the fact that they are very well established in the online trading industry whilst they are also regulated.
Brokers pay a license fee to Autochartist in order to use the technology and offer it to their clients. For me, this shows that the broker wants to support informed trading decisions and is always something I look for in a good broker. The fact they are willing to pay a fee to ensure clients get access to the best trading tools, is a very positive thing in my book.
Autochartist is completely aligned with traders’ objectives to be successful in the markets. They do not earn any referral fees, commissions or get any rebates from brokers. They want traders to be successful with their software so that brokers will continue to offer it to their clientele and more brokers will come on board.
If your broker doesn’t provide access to Autochartist, there are some companies who provide an alternative way to get the charting tool. This includes:
- What2trade: free with adverts, x3 updates per day, forex/stocks/futures
- Chart Viper: subscription model, updated every 15 minutes, forex/stocks
How does Autochartist work?
It is quick and easy to get setup with Autochartist once you have the MetaTrader 4/5 platform. The setup process goes as follows:
- Download MetaTrader 4/5
- Open a MetaTrader 4/5 account
- Login to your MetaTrader 4/5 account
- Select the Expert Advisors option within the MT4 navigator window
- Find the Autochartist tool in the navigator window
- Drag and drop the Autochartist tool on to the chart
- The Autochartist window will appear and be ready to use
- Start automatically analysing the markets
- Get trading signal alerts
The MetaTrader chart below shows how the Autochartist plugin looks like once it has been installed onto your traidng platform.
Autochartist Support
Interestingly, Autochartist do not offer support for their products directly to traders. Instead, they offer 2nd line support via the channels through which they provide Autochartist. That being said, there is an extensive range of educational materials relating to their products and services. You can find a help centre on their website with plenty of articles covering various relevant subjects. Users get access to in depth articles, videos, eBooks and webinars which are hosted by Autochartist.
About Autochartist
Founded in 2004, Autochartist services millions of traders around the world through their extensive relationships with various brokers. The company has partnered with many leading global Stock, Forex, Futures and CFD brokerage firms. They distribute thousands of articles daily in more than 20 languages. The company state that “We pride ourselves on our core commitment to service excellence and ongoing market leadership through developing innovative new products.”
Interestingly, Autochartist have acquired a few other online businesses over the years, including the VerifyMyTrade.com service. This is a useful service that is used by traders to validate their trading history and returns. They also purchased Delkos.com which is most predominantly known as a news aggregation website.
Autochartist Conclusion
To summarise, Autochartist is a powerful pattern-recognition tool which is capable of automatically monitoring the markets on your behalf. It can recognise chart patterns and highlight opportunities to you through alerts.
It monitors the markets 24 hours a day, alerting you to trading opportunities in real time. This leaves you with more free time to improve your trading skills and knowledge of the markets, whilst trying different trading strategies.
Autochartist for traders is a complete market analysis pack, including feeds of technical and statistical events, financial news event analysis, APIs, embedded components and blog posts. There are content and tools that help manage trading risk through analysis of upcoming volatility.
The Autochartist platform delivers a complete trading service for traders which covers all of the most important aspects of trading online from educating traders to providing convenient chart analysis along with actionable trading signals.
It is fully customisable so that you can set it to scan the trading instruments and timeframes that matter the most to you. That way you only get alerted when something relevant to your trading strategy happens. You can set watchlists to manage your favourite symbols and settings.
I think that it is important to reiterate that Autochartist is NOT a signal service. Whilst that may sound strange to those of you who have made it this far through the review, let me elaborate.
Autochartist does send signals alerts in terms of finding possible trade opportunities based on chart patterns, technical analysis, price action and fundamental analysis. However, these are subjective and do require initiative on behalf of the trader using the tool.
What may look like a valid signal to one trader, may be a complete opposite signal to another trader. It could even be no signal in the mind of yet another trader. It really depends on what your individual trading strategy is and your goals are.
For that reason, I would always look to conduct my own additional market analysis to confirm all trading signals, whether that be from the Autochartist tool or any other forex software. Do not expect to be getting winning signals every single time. That is not the point of this trading tool. It just makes scanning numerous charts and timeframes a lot quicker and easier than it would be without it.
If you would like to learn more about Autochartist and even see it in action, please feel free to visit the official website using the link below.
Autochartist
Free
Pros
- Fully automated chart analysis
- Combination of different analysis
- Real time trading signals
- Custom market scans / alerts
- Watchlists
- Actionable trade ideas
- Any trading instrument
- MetaTrader platform plugin
- Free via forex brokers
- User-friendly interface
Cons
- Steep learning curve
- Quite complex for beginners
- Overwhelming range of features
Self-confessed Forex Geek spending my days researching and testing everything forex related. I have many years of experience in the forex industry having reviewed thousands of forex robots, brokers, strategies, courses and more. I share my knowledge with you for free to help you learn more about the crazy world of forex trading! Read more about me.
